I haven’t used iOS on any device — I’m not part of the developer program — so only have critiques like Michael’s to go on. It appears that there are some fundamental changes to how you interact with the OS that seem careless — even thoughtless. As Michael says:

However, when I look at a beta I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it. I get scared. This isn’t a matter of ‘oh, it’s a little glitchy now and then’; these are things that from the looks of it seem simply like poor design decisions.

Here are the things I see as issues with the iOS 7 Beta. It’ll be interesting to see which ones are resolved by ‘this fall’.

Circles for signal strength — as Michael and many others have said, this breaks a fairly widespread standard, takes up precious horizontal space, uses the same UI element as pagination and seems to be solving an issue that just doesn’t exist for many users — we all know what those bars at the top of our phones mean.

Affordability of controls — I see lots of ‘text as buttons’ in the iOS screenshots I’ve seen. How do I know whether something is a label or a control? And, as Michael says, what issue is this trying to fix? Seems like minimalism for the sake of it.

Swipe right on the whole lockscreen — this one shocked me the most. Apparently, you can now swipe right anywhere on the lockscreen and it’ll unlock the device. This doesn’t seem pocket-friendly at all. I also wonder how much of an effect the removal of the UI controls for this gesture will impact the usability & obviousness of the gesture. For example, my 15 month old daughter is able to unlock an iOS device. She knows that by moving the drag handle near the bottom of the screen to the right, the device unlocks. All the affordance that informs & reassures her about this gesture is gone in iOS 7. It’ll be interesting to see if she can still unlock my iPhone when I install the OS later this year.

Yes, yes, it’s a Beta, there are bound to be some glitches. And there’s plenty of time to fix & improve before the OS is released. But I have to agree with Michael — some of these things are just bad design decisions.

I’ll revisit this post in ‘the fall’. Or Autumn, as we say around these parts.